With the advent of digital photography, consumers are amassing large collections of digital images and videos. The average number of images captures with digital cameras per photographer is still increasing each year. As a consequence, the organization and retrieval of images and videos is already a problem for the typical consumer. Currently, the length of time spanned by a typical consumer's digital image collection is only a few years. The organization and retrieval problem will continue to grow as the length of time spanned by the average digital image and video collection increases.
Image collection users desire to share their image collections with one another. However, it can be a difficult process for the user to manage requests from friends and relatives to view images. In U.S. Published Patent Application 2006/0048059A1, Etkin describes a system where users are a member of an online community. A user has a number of people contacts, and each person contact has an associated relationship link strength. The relationship link strength is determined in part from tags in images. For example, the tags can be names of people. This system would be sufficient when the names are complete names that uniquely identify the person of interest. However, if a tag is a first name, there are many potential matches, (e.g. in 2004 alone, over 24,000 new babies were named “Emily”.) Thus, for Etkin's process to work effectively, any online community with a large membership would need to rely of tags that positively identify the individual in an image (such as full name, social security number, phone number, email address, etc.) Etkin's process does not exploit the vast amount of information contained within images and videos to determine the relationship link strength.
Furthermore, a user desires to find images and videos containing a particular unique object, such as a person of interest. The user can perform a laborious manual search to find images and videos containing particular unique objects of interest. Available commercial software (e.g. Adobe Album) permits users to tag images with labels indicating the people in the images so that searches can later be done, the initial labeling process is still very tedious and time consuming. Moreover, many users simply will not label their image collection. Although a user has invested the time to label her image collection, she can have difficulty finding relevant images from a friend's unlabeled image collection.